We have a really dangerous anti-science problem in America and it involves short-term, pressing issues that can harm people right now - food and medicine. In America, those beliefs are primarily among rich, educated progressives: as Seth Mnookin recounted at NPR and I mentioned in Science Left Behind, you can draw a circle around a Whole Foods and find a whole host of crazy notions about supplements, homeopathy, vaccines and organic food.

US Right To Know, an anti-GMO front group funded by organic food corporations, has made no secret of its willingness to smear and bully and libel scientists and journalists and anyone else who stands up to their campaigns of fear and doubt about the competitors of their clients.They are Deniers For Hire in the purest sense. A short while ago one of their advisors, Lisa Graves, who runs the political attack site SourceWatch, libeled me by calling me a "felon" but US Right To Know could just dismiss that as not being someone directly working for them. Now they have gone over the top under their own banner.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/scienceandtech/columns/fo… are two reasons NASA does not get more support.

Remember that terrific egg in a frying pan public service announcement warning us all about the dangers of drugs? It was well done, stoners in the 1980s said things like, "I'm so fried" (they are much healthier now, they say they are baked rather than fried) but it was widely ridiculed.Who knew that 25 years later similar imagery would have the psychology community filled with glee, just because it used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)?Littlefield has tackled these issues before, like in 2007 when he debunked "dolphin-assisted therapy."

Do you believe your car grill says something meaningful about you? That a messy office means you are more likely to be racist? That some people have precognitive abilities?Those are all peer-reviewed psychology papers and, because psychologists claim it is science, they have fed the growing distrust of science by the public. It isn't global warming or GMOs that polarize people the most, it's the 'social sciences'. Like political science or military science, those are not science at all, it is just a proper name, and when the science is just statistics placed into charts by academics who surveyed college undergraduates that either got paid or received extra credit (meaning they are psychology undergraduate students), the public gets weary.

Are conservatives more subservient to authority while liberals are more independent and free thinking?If you read social science claims, the humanities, and certainly the fringes of partisan science media, you would think so; it's a non-stop culture war by people who just happen to not be conservatives and who claim they are not because, well, conservatives are wrong about everything.

To anti-science hippies, 'drink this pesticide if it is so safe' is the kind of mic-dropping burn that resonates with the sub-literate primates who don't understand the basics of toxicology and buy supplements and deny vaccines.Drinking any pesticide, organic or synthetic, is an IQ test, not a science experiment. Unless you are writing at whatever GM Watch is.

On Science 2.0, we've long been critical of claims about "brain training" games, Baby Einstein videos, and the whole lot of quick fixes. In brain training games, they only teach you to get better at playing their games.

Four new elements that have been added to the periodic table, completing its seventh row, according to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).Now comes the fun part - picking names for them. Hopefully, they will look beyond naming them after Johnny Depp or a Keith Richards. In the meantime, they are being called ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).It's not even trivial to identify them as elements. 

Antibiotic resistance is a concern worldwide - scientists and public health officials are finally beginning to agree about the use of low dose antibiotics as growth promoters in livestock feed: It needs to stop immediately. No more evidence is needed than recent, troubling reports about the appearance of a new gene in both pigs and humans in China.